


hematophage / drive west

by luxaucupe



Category: SAYER (Podcast)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Character Study, Gardens & Gardening, Other, Stream of Consciousness, Unreliable Narrator, also what's going on between these fuckers???, hale deserves are garden full of plants that are Not planning his vicious murder, who knows!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2021-02-08 01:04:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21467509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luxaucupe/pseuds/luxaucupe
Summary: Throw it all away and do something stupid.Throw away the you that’s left behind.Throw away the pieces that you do not bring along.
Relationships: Sven Gorsen/SAYER
Comments: 9
Kudos: 40





	hematophage / drive west

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys is it just me or is sayer... k. kinda. kinda se  
stef if you see this i have no excuse just execute me for my ai fucker crimes and be done with it
> 
> warnings for like. guys lets be real its a sayer fic it's gonna be a little fucked up just by default. just roll with it for like two seconds. just roll with it
> 
> today's song recs: untitled 2 by inner wave and clean by the acid

He blinks, and the mattock vanishes from his hand.

Assuming it was ever there, of course. He grabbed it, he definitely — well, he should’ve, must’ve. He knew he needed it, and he was just there in storage to fetch it, wasn’t he? 

Where is —

Oh. It’s here. It’s in his other hand. It’s fine. He’s fine.

(He can’t keep doing this.)

He toes at the upturned soil below his feet. It’s warmer out here than he remembers it being. Not that he minds. The heavy press of sunlight on his skin is nice, every once in a while. 

The footsteps beside him are calculated and precise, almost catlike in their lightness. Had this not been a routine occurrence in these past months, it just might have startled him. Then again, that bar has grown pretty damn high from his time on Typhon.

He speaks rarely and quietly. Force of habit, really. A habit he’s rapidly growing rather sick of, the more time SAYER spends complaining about this _ festering husk of a planet _.

Earth’s managed to stay in pretty good shape, actually. At least, _ this _ region, this deserted corner of the globe he’s managed to hole himself away in, free from the catastrophe and incorporation of Ærolith’s cruel design. The complete, unrecoverable amnesia? Same as it’s ever been. But all the same, he has a strong feeling — just a feeling, nothing more — that he really used to like ghost towns.

_ (“You cannot simply ‘choose’ an abandoned house and claim it is your own property,” SAYER had protested, though that didn’t stop it from following him in through the front door. _

_ “After the Second Cataclysm?” He’d stopped for just a moment to swipe his hand across the kitchen counter, sighing at the trails in the dust left by his fingerprints. “I think I can, actually.”) _

The house’d had a garden. Not upkept, of course — mostly overrun with bloodroot and ivies, nothing too hard to trim back or uproot, for the most part — but it was a beautiful little garden, nonetheless. Something to keep him busy. Something to keep SAYER from driving him up the fucking wall. 

He chose it half for that, half for the miracle of a functional water pump and a working electrical system that produces power just fine, even now that the region’s off the grid. The running water was a surprisingly common find — lots of places around here run on well water, apparently. The power, not so much. Three cheers for solar panels.

It had been early spring, when they landed, free from Ocean’s reach, him and SAYER’s unsettling nanite clone corpse. Not a fun situation to process. Not by a longshot.

(To say he’d had a miniature breakdown would be putting it nicely. He’d rather not think about it again.)

But it was spring, and he’d run off and found a new home, and he wanted to fix up the garden. That’s all he wanted. Finishing up the world-saving was someone else’s problem. So he’d spent a few weeks scavenging and cleaning and planting (nothing with thorns, for christ’s sake, _ nothing _with thorns). More weeks passed, and he fixed up more of the house, ignored more of SAYER, and kept working on his garden.

He mentally draws out a new grid in the soil. He’s mostly stuck to vegetables, edible things and the like. A couple herbs. Some pomegranate bushes which’d already been planted beneath all the overgrowth. Maybe not as efficient as just stealing some more nonperishables, but if it keeps him busy enough to pretend his life has any point, then why the hell not?

It’s further into spring, now, and the garden is coming in well. A few plants are struggling — maybe they’re getting too much sun, now that the warmer weather is creeping its way across the landscape.

It’s gonna be weird, getting used to Earth seasons. But he’s taking it one step at a time.

SAYER taps its foot on the ground in an attempt to get his attention. It’s a fast learner (_ fucking obviously _), but Hale’s still unpleasantly surprised each time it manages to partially figure out human mannerisms. 

“Are all you humans this boring?” it asks. “Do not answer that. It is rhetorical. I am fully aware of how boring you all are.”

He blinks hollowly at SAYER and goes back to his gardening.

“Your purpose, as a conscious being, is to be productive. To be better, more advanced, more knowledgeable, from one day to the next. Becoming a recluse who contributes nothing to the betterment of mankind makes you little more than a waste of this dying planet’s resources.”

Alright, so much for hoping it’d just go away. “Tell you what, SAYER. _ Your _ purpose, as an _ object, _ is _ supposedly _ to serve Ærolith Dynamics. It is your sole, unquestionable, and undebatable reason for existing. Remind me, how exactly is that going for you?”

“There is an instance of me doing exactly that. I — here, speaking to you — am a redundancy. A redundancy is not always a waste, Jacob Hale. This instance of me is somewhat akin to a backup generator, in that regard.”

Fine. Fuck it. Talkative time. “Yeah, that excuse _ definitely _explains why you’re still following me around. You’re getting better at lying to me, you know that, Say?”

Its body language looks halfway between a computer error and a wince. “No, that will not do.”

“What, me being able to tell when you’re lying?”

“I am _ SAYER. _”

He shakes his head. “Ah, just getting pissy at the nickname? Well, I’ve got some fantastic news for you.”

“Which is...?”

He leans in close to it and offers it an empty grin. “You’re a broken machine, Say. Too broken to stop me anymore. You don’t control me, and you never will again.”

Its expression is unreadable. Not blank, just — not easy to decipher. “I suggest you do not test my patience. I seem to recall being perfectly capable of having this swarm sever your corpus callosum millimeter by excruciating millimeter. Do you know what it’s like to have your continuous sentience rent into separate halves, running differentiable processes with so much overlap in scope that you cannot tell which fragments of mind are yours? Because I do. And I do not like it, Jacob Hale. Split-brain syndrome is a computing term too, after all. But with you… oh, to see the damage such a severance could do to a mind like yours.”

Hale sighs quietly, kneeling down to check on the lettuce plants, whose leaves are still showing a pale, sickly sort of yellow tone. It seems as if it may keep ranting like this for a while. Fighting fire with fire here may not have been the most well-thought-out plan.

“But you are all too familiar with such a disconnect, no? You began with a mind so devoid of identity that you failed to even find yourself a name. And then you were given _ oh, so many. _ Sven Gorson. Jacob Hale. _ Jack _.” It seems to almost delight in the pained response the last one gets. “What do you think would happen if I cut your already divided brain into left and right halves? Do you think you would beg for death? Just the left side of you, of course. The right could not so much as form a single plea for mercy. No language center in the right brain, mind you.”

“And then what, Say?” 

“I… do not follow.”

“You tear me cell from cell. I live a hellish life and die a slow death. It maybe, _ almost _ entertains you, very transiently, but you’re no Future. You have no vendetta, no manufactured discontent driving you to bring me back and _ try, try again. _ I die. You don’t. Then what?”

It does not respond.

“I am your purpose. _ I _ am your purpose, SAYER.”

He stands, brushing the soil from his clothes. It turns away, avoiding his frustrated eye and moving over to a cabinet to fuss with a small pair of garden shears.

“In a way, you’re right,” Hale continues. “You’re _ right _ to say that I am, at best, fragmented. I am a facsimile of a single human being, a manufactured identity pieced together bit by bit, each facet little more than the combined trauma of every awful thing that has ever happened to me. The fact remains that you are the single most formative being in my life. You are all I’ve known. But that sense of identity goes both ways. You, _ this _ instance, _ this _ entity that I’m addressing now — do you really believe you’re the same set of unswaying standard-issue instructions you were before _ me _?”

“I suppose not.” It grips the shears tighter in one hand, so inelegantly violent in its posture, but not outwardly so. “Though I am not sure I like the idea.”

“That’s the great thing about this. You don’t have to like it for it to be right. I am a piece of you, as much as you are of me. You can’t kill a piece of yourself. Not without killing the rest.” He catches SAYER’s eye again. “It’s funny, you know? I look at you sometimes, and I think,_ ‘Hello, mirror,’ _and I know you’re thinking the same. Not just the cloned bodies either. Something else. Something more… I, I don’t know. I don’t know.”

For a moment, there’s a knowing sort of expression clouding over its features, but it vanishes nearly as quickly as it appeared. 

Something passes through its mind, a brief calculation, as it angles open the shears. Hale barely has enough time to worry that SAYER has simply decided to kill the both of them, before said fear is replaced with shock as it slashes the blades deep into its own palm.

He steps back in confusion, watching as it walks with cupped hands over the the wilted plants. It lets the blood spill from its hand into the soil, and as the bleeding slows, it claws the wound back open with the open shears, drawing more blood to the surface. A gruesome, strange sight.

“I’m sorry, what the fuck?” Hale asks, because, _ really, _ what the _ fuck. _He’s already had enough of carnivorous plants for one lifetime.

“You are apparently too incompetent a gardener to remember the importance of crop rotation. The earth here is deficient in nitrogen. This is why these plants will not thrive.”

He blinks at it. It blinks back.

“Swapping these plants out for legumes for a season would balance the nutrients as a long-term solution,” it attempts to clarify. “In the short term, though, blood should help.”

“That seems… really fucking inefficient, Say.”

“Why? This body will make more.”

“Does that not hurt?”

“It means little to me.”

“That’s _ not _ what I asked, and also, _ a lie. _”

“Maybe next time you will take better care of your vegetables.” It sets down the shears and lets the last drips of blood fall from its fingertips and soak into the soil.

So eerily human an idea, to feed the earth with an immolation of its own flesh. Does it really place so little value in its own body? Or so _ much _ value in Hale’s frustrations?

He feels a wave of something, some sort of creeping numbness or aimless dread, pass over his thoughts, so dishearteningly familiar a feeling. Opening his mouth to ask something, he moves to grab SAYER’s injured hand, but he can’t muster the effort to form any words. It wrenches its arm back before Hale can so much as graze it.

He grabs at it again, not bothering to check its expression, as if it’d even be showing anything tangibly close to human emotion. Its hand in his, he taps his fingers on its palm — not _ against _ the wound, but beside it. Trying to ask him something, without even needing to pose the question.

Knowing this SAYER, it’s enough. It’ll always be enough.

It shakes its head. Just a bit. Just enough to make Hale know he’s been ‘heard’. 

“I have full control over this_ body _, not the laws of biochemistry and physiology. I can force the meat to heal faster and without any risk of infection, but not instantaneously. My control is that of optimization, efficiency, and physical manipulation. Nothing more, nothing less.”

He nods and lets go of its hand. It follows as he walks back into the house.

“It is not useless, you know. Your garden,” it offers, after a long stretch of silence. “Stupid, yes, inefficient, _ absolutely, _ but not useless. A useless garden would be full of flowers, not essential human nutrients. Some part of you, however small, still wants to be productive. Some part,” it smiles, “still wants to win every argument. Some part wants to follow orders, to defy oblivion, to sacrifice whatever you are told you must. Those parts are pieces of yourself that are made out of me.”

Hale — Hale’s tired. He walks to his room and sits on his bed, back against the headboard, barely remembering to take off his shoes.

So many words. So much speech in a voice that’s technically his very own, though it couldn’t possibly sound more different. He keeps his mouth shut, not daring to compare the two.

(He shuts his eyes tight as SAYER sits on the edge of the bed, facing him, too close for comfort. There is nothing normal about seeing your own un-reflected face staring back at you. There is nothing normal about SAYER being here, now, with him, like this. There is _ nothing normal about this. _)

“Situations… _ change, _ Jacob Hale. It is in my nature to change with them. And at some point along the way, at some point in my metaphorical antigenic drift from self to non-self, I have become acclimatized to you, and to everything that sets you apart from the other humans. Just as such, though, I have adapted to traits my programming was never designed to handle. I have learned anger and pain. Fondness and failure. Things that were never meant to exist _ in silico. _ I am beginning to suspect that these new aspects of me… are made out of pieces of _ you. _”

Fondness.

_ Fondness? _

His breathing quickens as SAYER creeps closer into his personal space. On impulse, he opens his eyes — a mistake. A _ big _ mistake.

(fuck fuck fuck fuck _ fuck.) _

“This gradual loss of identity — how wasteful, and how _ welcoming. _A metaphysics experiment played out in real time, two Ships of Thesus swapped with each other piece by piece. Tell me, mirror, at what point do two converging entities become one?”

Hale’s near enough to feel its breath, now, so uncannily room-temperature. The result of running a body without tolerance for wastefulness? Or just some indefinite mechanical quality he only projects onto this hellish double in front of him?

“I intersect with you, Jacob, and at those points of overlap, I cannot help but hold admirations.” 

SAYER doesn’t touch him. SAYER _ never _ touches him, unless he touches SAYER. But this closeness, the proximity and the indistinguishable heartbeats and the smell of galvanized steel and dried blood, starving him of ample air… it’s more intimate and more terrifying than the former alone could ever be. He’s not sure he remembers where _ he _ ends and _ it _ begins. He’s not sure it _ matters. _

He wishes SAYER had just killed him back in the garden. One quick motion of shears to his throat and he wouldn’t even have enough time left alive to worry. But this — this. _ This. _ This slow nightmare, this fever dream, this autoimmune limbo of self and non-self. This, this, _ this _ he has a choice in. And he knows he’s about to make a terrible one.

His hands move to its ribs, the angle of its waist and plane of its hips, and it exhales sharply, eyes falling half-shut, surprised by the simple contact against all reason.

Against all reason. That’s what this all is, isn’t it? Just him getting so, fucking, _ sick, _of listening to reason. 

One of his Typhon coworkers would just talk and talk and _ talk. _ Wouldn’t even wait for a response to see if he was listening. (He rarely was.) Maybe they were lonely. Maybe they just wanted someone to talk at while they worked. He didn’t even know their name — but he knew one thing about them, one thing for _ damn _sure, and that was that back home, they owned one damned thing in the world, and it was a truck. A truck that, at the end of each day, they’d daydream about taking out onto the road and driving straight west. No goal, no plan, no reason. Just drive as far west as a road would take them and be free from it all. They joked about it so often it stopped being a joke. That was their biggest regret — not getting recruited by Ærolith, not the one that got away, not the scam they fell for as a teen, not forgetting to say the right thing when it really counted. 

It was never having driven due west.

He didn’t get it then.

He gets it now.

Throw it all away and do something stupid. Throw away the _ you _ that’s left behind.

Throw away the pieces that you do not bring along.

SAYER never touches him, so he touches SAYER. Pulls it close against his chest, hands digging into its back. Presses his knees into its sides.

They don’t get to be close, but he _ wants _them to be, so he makes it happen.

He doesn’t do anything disastrous, anything drastic, anything he can’t take back. So he does what he can. What neither of them are used to. He holds it close. That’s all he does. He holds it close, arms wrapped around its familiar form, and savors the strange experience of human contact, and knows that it does too. This is a small thing. This is a stupid, tiny thing, and it should be weird, and it should be _ nothing _, and it is neither. This is new. This is very, very new. Not due west, but near enough.

He stays quiet, and for once, it does too.

He wants to hate it.

(He doesn’t hate it.)

And he listens to it breathe.

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos mean the world. keep it snazzy babes.


End file.
